GNOME Shell No Longer Requires GPU Acceleration 237
An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME 3.0 Shell with the Mutter window manager no longer requires GPU acceleration to work, while still retaining the compositing window manager and OpenGL support. GNOME Shell can now work entirely on the CPU using the LLVM compiler via the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver. This will be another change to Fedora 17 to no longer depend upon the GNOME3 fall-back, which is expected to eventually be deprecated and further anger GNOME2 fans."
Software GPU Emulation (Score:5, Insightful)
"fall-back .. to be eventually depreacated" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"fall-back .. to be eventually depreacated" (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, I can't wrap my mind around why the most clunky, disgustingly inefficient windows managers are installed BY DEFAULT!
You'd think they were trying to copy Win7 and OS X's shinies in some half-arsed attempt to gain followers...
Oh, wait...
xubuntu and lubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
thank goodness for xubuntu and lubuntu! kubuntu too... the linux-for-OS-refugees world still has some shining lights.
Re:"fall-back .. to be eventually depreacated" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't entirely agree. One thing that I liked about Ubuntu is that I could pretty much install it for anyone who wasn't computer literate and have them safely and easily do basic user tasks. To be able to support them well, I tend to use the same settings as they are so that I can help them even when I'm not in front of a computer.
You can imagine that those kind of people are less likely to cope with huge paradigm shifts like Gnome2->Unity? The two most important of these users I have are my own mother and my mother in law. I don't foresee much problems with my mom, she's a science person (Master in Chemistry) and she'll cope. It will take her effort, but she's aware these changes require it. Mother in law though? Oh, boy, I so dread Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I only give them LTSes)
It's not that I cannot install a different distro or install a different DE. I can, it's just that Ubuntu (10.04 LTS) did give perfectly sane defaults with a reasonable interface with good discoverability. I personally see that gone with Unity.
I have looked into Debian for an alternative, but Ubuntu does give a significant amount of polish (I'd mention the "Language Support" applet, for which I haven't found a decent alternative in Debian. I live in a multi-lingual environment, and it's pretty much the best tool I've seen in any operating system. It's not the only thing ) Linux Mint has been highly recommended on slashdot, and I'll most likely check it out sooner or later. I should also give Lubuntu a shot (LXDE, I use that on my Asus EEE 701 4G). It might be the way out of this mess. When doing a PXE installation of Ubuntu 11.10 it's given as a true option.
All in all, switching to Unity is alienating the userbase. Tech people because they don't like the dumbed down aspect of it, and non-tech people because of the familiarity (and let's face it, pretty traditional way of doing things of GNome2). Except for the light destop environments, I see none of the big ones being even remotely desirable... I know people think that GNome2 looks old, I happen to disagree. It's mature. Iron out the tiny bugs and annoyances and you'd get a rock stable useful UI. However, we can't do that in the open source world. Always, new, alway rewrite alway try out the newest language. Cut it already and realize this needs to stop.
Just reached a decent compromise on my machine (Score:4, Insightful)
Debian Sid introduced Gnome 3 a couple of weeks ago and I had a bit of a tough time to come to terms with it, but now I have reached a good compromise by installing tint2 and the alternate menu extension (which basically brings back the switch off menu item).
I'm rather pleased with this setup and the only thing I am really missing are a couple of applets, but nothing major.
Or, as other have said, XFCE is a great alternative, especially if you NEED external outputs (which gnome-shell still miserably fails to manage properly).
Re:this would be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the way the Gnome3 devs are all working against each other that really sucks.
You have a half-incomplete tablet UI allied to a half-incomplete laptop UI both of which get on the tits of desktop users;
- and my feeling of 'at least they are going somewhere different and interesting' has evaporated now I see Gnome 3.2 is identical to 3,0 in every single cockup. Only one of the real UI problems has been addressed; and more ill-considered and contradictory decisions have been imposed on us.
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:5, Insightful)
It was useful for the poster to quote the entire post because many of us often filter out all posts by Anonymous Cowards. By filtering out the ACs, you avoid a lot of crap and frosty pisses and enthusiastic racist name-calling.
It was an insightful post by someone who didn't care to create an account, even though it's very easy to create an account and Slashdot is very good about not misusing our email addresses. By quoting the good post in full, the GP performed a service to the community.
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that an attempt at recursive humor?
Presumably why they now have Vala.
AKA: Object Orientated?
I'm not convinced by this argument, it's possible to write inefficient code in any language.
While I don't actually like Gnome, being written in C is about the only thing I do like about it. I certainly don't consider GObject/Gtk to be worse than QT or Apples API's.
Re:I like Gnome Shell (Score:5, Insightful)
None. Not any.
It becomes clearer every day that people hate Gnome 3, and yet even as the soft noise builds to a roar, some people think it's merely a few haters bellyaching.
Listen, people hate the *shit* out of Gnome 3. It seems obvious that what started out as an attempt to create some sort of tablet-compatible UI which is also palatable on the desktop has now become a large liability. Gnome 3 has nothing that users asked for - it has been funded and driven by corporate interests (ahem INTEL) that wish to eventually provide some competition to Android's current domination in the Linux tablet market.
People hate Gnome 3. Developers hate Gnome 3. Gnome 3 is simply one of the worst abortions of a window manager to ever appear on Linux, and the situation is not going to get any better until people start fleeing and distributions leave it in the dust.
The writing's on the wall, but just because you avoid glancing in that direction that does not mean you can expect us all to swallow your fantasy about Gnome 3's awesome suitability.
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:2, Insightful)
> I've had a lot more success with interoperability between Java, Scala, and Clojure than I ever have had with any GObject-based code. The same goes for .NET when the languages are C#, VB.NET and F#. Those all work seamlessly with almost no effort, while GObject needs a lot of hand-holding and even then it often just doesn't work.
That's hardly a surprise. All JVM languages use the same object system underneath and were explicitly designed to interop with it. Same for CLR languages. When you use GObject, you are using it as a portable, but foreign object system that has to co-exist with the native one (like Python's). This is not poor design. It's a good work-around, given the constraints.
It's one thing to discuss whether GNOME should have been in C++, but another to compare it with JVM/CLR features. Core libraries should be native, not byte code.
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:4, Insightful)
You've had AC's disabled for a while, eh? I only ever see a few frosty pisses or goatse's or whatever per discussion, and a lot more useless shit from people who've actually signed in.